Filing - Prepare for the Unexpected

Last Updated: 01/18/17

In this article:

Potential Filing Disruptions; Back-Up Filing Documents

Document validation, clearing XBRL errors, and test filing will get you a long way towards a successful filing, but there are factors outside your control that can prevent the submission. To mitigate risks of filing delays, your Customer Success Manager (CSM) is available to help you prepare a back-up plan.

Potential Filing Disruptions

Local Internet Outage - Internet service in your office, building or home may be unavailable unexpectedly.

If you have a team member with filing permissions in another location, this provides a great backup for local internet problems.

Otherwise, prepare a secondary internet source where you can log in to Wdesk and submit your filing. (This could be a personal mifi that runs on a cell network, a local coffee shop or library.)

NOTE: If your computer is not mobile (e.g. a laptop) be sure to test out the computer at this secondary location in advance to determine that the technical environment will support your needs.

Regional Internet Outage - Internet service in your greater region may be unavailable, eliminating the option for nearby internet access to submit the filing.

If you have a team member with filing permissions in another location, this provides a great backup for regional internet problems.

Otherwise, a second option is to contact your CSM to initiate a live filing from his or her location. Contact your CSM for more information on this option.

Wdesk Server Issues - Wdesk servers that control the application and house your data may be unavailable.

If this occurs, contact your CSM to begin the manual filing process with the SEC. You must have previously backed up your filing documents. See instructions below.

SEC Servers are Unavailable or Slow - The SEC servers are the destination for your filing and may be unexpectedly slow or unavailable. This is most often experienced at peak filing periods, especially around the 5:30pm EST cut-off.

The best way to avoid missing a deadline due to SEC server delays or unresponsiveness is to schedule the filing well in advance of the time it is due.

If the filing deadline is missed due to an SEC server issue, the SEC has historically accepted requests for a filing date adjustment; however, there is no guarantee.

Which one of the above is causing your problem? Knowing a problem's cause drives the solution. At times it may be tricky to discern which of the above is responsible for any unusual behavior. In general, with an internet outage, local or regional, you will likely lose access to other websites as well. If there is a server issue, typically there are varying responsiveness issues within Wdesk while other sites and services may display normal behavior. Lastly, SEC Server issues are indicated by slow or no response during filing.

Back-Up Filing Documents

One day prior to your live filing, you should always maintain a project that is "ready to file". This means that every time there are significant changes made to any filing document or XBRL data, you should go through the first two steps of the filing wizard to generate new EDGAR and XBRL filing documents. NOTE: If there is no XBRL, then only the first step of the Filing Wizard is needed to generate the EDGAR filing documents. If XBRL is to be included in the filing, completing the first two steps of the Filing Wizard will ensure that the XBRL documents correspond to the EDGAR documents. Also, the XBRL generation results verify that the package is free of XBRL errors.

The newly generated documents populate to the Documents tab of the project in two separate folders: EDGAR Filing Documents and XBRL Filing Documents. After completing the first two steps of the Filing Wizard, you can download those files to a local drive on your computer to use in the manual filing process.

To download these files, click Download Filing Documents in the Projects panel and follow the prompts to save files to your computer. NOTE: All downloaded files should be managed per your company IT department’s security standards for pre-public information.

In the case that an issue arises with Wdesk, please contact your CSM to help you initiate the back-up filing process. Since these disruptions typically last only a few minutes, the back-up filing process will likely not be necessary. At that point, you and your CSM will evaluate the situation and decide a course of action based upon all available information.